Why do fans love to hate on Jimmie Johnson?

Roxana Popescu

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It happens every time Jimmie Johnson is poised to demolish another NASCAR record or trounce another contender and then crack that bashful Jimmie smile: NASCAR Nation boos and hisses. And then the commentators ask the same old questions: Why do fans love to hate on Jimmie Johnson? Is he too good, too confident or just too Californian?

Because when you go east of the Mississippi and south of the Potomac, you get into NASCAR country. That’s where the die-hard stock car fans reside, and where emotions about cars and drivers run hotter than a bottle of bourbon forgotten under the Kentucky sun.

Johnson, born and bred in El Cajon, where his admirers remain steadfast, is shooting today for his sixth Sprint Cup championship. The Sprint Cup is the premier NASCAR racing series.

“I feel good. Definitely optimistic,” Johnson said by telephone, before the race.

After he slammed into a wall at his last race, claiming the series championship is more of a longshot now. If he does win, he’ll be one championship away from tying the record of seven Cup Series championships — and once again, that has some NASCAR lovers vexed.

When Johnson posted an impressive qualifying speed in Phoenix last Sunday, the audience booed, and then cheered when he didn’t come in first.

In the days building up to Sunday’s final race, Twitter has been buzzing with sentences combining “hate” “Jimmie Johnson” and an expletive.

On blogs, where people have more space for eloquence, comments dig deeper. “He is representative of the clean fingernail, euro male, testosterone free crowd who couldn’t (screw on) an oil filter to save themselves,” wrote one angry commenter named “Wajosekman” earlier this month on racing forum
Pitgrit.com
.

Johnson shrugs it all off, quoting another racing legend who endured his share of heckles, Dale Earnhardt, Sr.: “As long as they’re making noise.”

In El Cajon, you don’t hear anyone grunting about his success. Around here, Johnson is the golden son. He may be a national racing champion, but he’s never forgotten his roots, says Don “Rocky” Roccoforte, Johnson’s former hair stylist. He gives to local charities, and gives often. That’s one more reason his fans here venerate him.

“It’s very disrespectful,” Freeman Davis, a racing connoisseur shopping at Big Lots in downtown El Cajon last week, said of the booing. Davis was eager to claim Johnson as one of his heroes. “He’s a local boy!”

Racing buffs from Johnson’s home turf have been trying to put their fingers on what it is about Johnson — or NASCAR — that keeps the Anti-Jimmies so riled up.

They like to think it’s the California factor. “This is the West Coast! We got the best weather out here. We got the best car drivers, the best looking women,” Davis said.

Johnson moved to Charlotte, N.C., in 1997 — with a one-way ticket, he adds — to be in the heart of the auto racing world. In a landlocked city, he chose a villa near a lake, so he could “have a little of home with me.”

Back home, people speculate he’s still viewed as a foreign threat out there.

San Diego is about as far in mood from NASCAR as Versailles. El Cajon is at an intersection of sorts between those two worlds — but it’s still miles and miles away from the sport’s base, and people don’t forget that.

“To go to Carolina and then dominate their sport completely, I think they can’t get a handle on that,” Roccoforte said.

But Johnson gingerly dismissed his origins as a reason for the booing.

“I don’t think it’s the ‘where I’m from’ aspect. There are more drivers now from the state of California than ever.”

Others say it’s the Icarus effect: rising too fast, flying too high and making it look too easy. Or maybe it’s not that he’s not too good, but too goody-two-shoes. Off the track, he has a bombshell wife and a picture perfect toddler. When he talks about his life, he sounds blessed and grateful.

“I always smile when I think of home, and it’s just crazy to think I grew up right out there in the hills in El Cajon — crazy to think that all the years of riding around out there in the dirt has turned into all this.”

Where’s the attitude?

“I think they want, in the NASCAR family anyway, more controversy. He just wins races and he’s a nice guy. Sometimes, in that world of NASCAR, it’s hard to accept that,” noted off-road racing legend Ivan Stewart and a friend of Johnson’s, over a cup of coffee a few mornings ago.

Some people like their heroes wholesome and others want a little spice. Davis met Johnson at a charity event last year and thinks the good guy should prevail.

“You don’t hear about problems outside of the racing, as far as police, drugs, steroids. He does a good job and he does it well. So he should be able to win,” Davis said.

Or maybe the booing just boils down to America’s obsession with the underdog.

“Everybody loves a winner, as long as you don’t win too much,” Stewart said.

NASCAR has a long history of heckling legendary drivers when they were winning, including Earnhardt, Sr., Jeff Gordon, Darrell Waltrip, said Dan Pierce, a professor of NASCAR history at the University of North Carolina, Asheville.

In the early days of stock car racing, when someone got too good and started boring the fans, track owners used to hire better drivers to come into town and shake things up. They were called bounty hunters, Pierce said.

People today still get tired of seeing the same person win, and they love rooting against their targets as much as they love rooting for their heroes.

“There’s a term for it: you’re stinking up the show — when someone wins too much. He’s kind of stunk up the show the last few years for some people,” Pierce said.

Hating the winner? Being bored by greatness?

As counterintuitive as it sounds, it may be part of human nature.

Mina Cikara, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon who researches groups, belonging and empathy, said this happens everywhere, not just in racing.

“When people become too exceptional, we like to see them taken down a notch.”

She explained that when newcomers or outsiders don’t perform well, people don’t notice. But when they start to shine, that’s when people get bothered.

And in the world of sports, “when it’s explicitly competitive, that opens the door for these emotional responses from the fans.”